A Comprehensive Guide on Visual Marketing
It says a picture is worth a thousand words. And it is for a good reason. Visual perception of a product or service plays a crucial role in making the final decision whether it is to buy anything or to become a customer.
Besides, using visual elements in your branding helps people memorize your brand. It creates a direct connection between your brand, product, and image associated with this.
Therefore, using visual elements in your marketing strategy is another step to get closer to your potential customers. Visual marketing is a powerful tool that enables you to stand out from the crowd and acquire new customers.
In this guide, you will find out everything you need to know about visual marketing.
Shall we begin?
The Basics of Visual Marketing
Visual marketing stands for every visual element you use in your overall marketing strategy. Anything that helps your branding to stand out of the competition in the market. It includes website design, the company’s logo, product design, social media channels’ design, and everything in between.
To put it simply, all the things related to your brand that your customers can see with their eyes are a part of visual marketing.
Visual marketing has a strong correlation with your site performance. Especially, how well your site drives traffic from search engines.
You might wonder what the connection is?
It is not a secret that people explore any product or service by using search queries. Google suggests top results per request. The majority of the pages suggested are pieces of content. Consequently, content works like a bridge that connects potential customers with your product.
And if your content is spangled with visual elements, it attracts more people.
For instance, let’s review two blog posts on the same topic. One of the posts doesn’t include any visuals, the other one — does.
Pay attention to the level of organic traffic per month.
Post without visuals
Post with visuals
As you can see, the post with the images works much better in terms of attracting people’s attention.
Why does visual content bring more value compared to simple written text?
Our brain processes visuals faster than a standard text. To realize the idea behind the text, you need to spend some time before you read it. Whereas when you see an image or any other type of visuals, you understand the information in a blink of an eye.
Plus, don’t forget that visual content drives engagement. Especially, across social channels. If you don’t visually present your product, your potential customers might not understand it.
What are the types of visual marketing you should know?
Keep on reading to find out.
Types of Visual Marketing
Visual marketing is rich in the forms of content that you can use in practice. It starts from ordinary images, videos to interactive media. Let’s review some of them in more detail.
#1 Images and custom illustrations
The first visual element that content creators widely use is an image. Most of the time, content is mixed with stock images that you can find on such resources as Shutterstock. However, stock images don’t have any value for your content. Thus, if you want to add extra personalization to the images, you should focus on creating screenshots and custom illustrations.
Custom illustrations add personality to your business and brand. It is not a simple logo of the company. Custom illustrations allow you to create a brand’s character. It can be a person, animal, or whatever creature you want.
For example, if you review Ahrefs blog, you will see that it contains custom illustrations in every blog post.
Source: ahrefs.com
These brand’s characters are a bearded guy and a dog.
You can use custom illustrations not just on your blog but across social channels, your SWAG production, etc.
#2 Standard and animated videos
Video marketing is a powerful weapon in your marketing arsenal. By implementing videos in your content, you save your audience’s time. There is no need in reading the whole written material. But to watch the videos instead.
Moreover, video content is an excellent tool to show your customers how to use your product and can easily be inserted into your in-app guides and product tours for a more engaging experience
Another benefit of video content is that you can repurpose blog posts into videos. It helps you breathe life into outdated content adding new details. Lots of companies use this strategy in their content marketing activity.
For example, one of the leading companies that create SEO tools is Moz. The team behind Moz runs a comprehensive blog that covers SEO and Digital Marketing related topics. They identify the most traffic potential topics, write blog posts, and repurpose them into videos.
One of the latest blog posts you can find on Moz’s blog is about making newsworthy content.
Source: moz.com
They repurposed this topic into a video and uploaded it on their YouTube channel.
Source: Youtube.com
Your videos should cover niche-related topics suggesting solutions to the problems your target audience has. And one of the keys to solving the existing problem — using your product or service.
Animated videos are shorter than standard video content. They work perfectly to encourage people to learn more about your product and brand. Animated videos combine graphics, text, images, and illustrations in a small moving piece of content.
For instance, GIFs are one of the types of animated video content. You can add GIFs whenever you want — blog posts, Instagram “stories”, and other social media channels.
#3 Traditional and interactive infographics
Traditional infographics are graphic visuals to present any kind of information. Infographics vary. They can include charts, flowcharts, histograms, and many other types of visual content.
Marketers find infographics as the best option to present information. They should be simple and easy to consume. Because when your infographic contains lots of information and data, it makes it difficult to understand.
This example of a flowchart proves this statement. As you can see, it is simple but yet contains a good chunk of information. By the way, you can create a similar flowchart with the help of a free flowchart maker.
Interactive infographics are the same as traditional infographics but include dynamic content. Marketers tend to use them when there is a necessity to get new customers, increase the level of engagement, and nudge people to share information across social channels.
#4 Interactive media
The primary goal of interactive media is to create conditions for the active participation of consumers with the product and brand. Interactive media should include one of the visual marketing elements — video, animation, moving graphs, or images.
Interactive media gains momentum these days. Especially, in the COVID era when all businesses are focused on promoting their products on social platforms like Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram.
There are many opportunities on how to implement interactive media in your marketing strategy. As an example, live video. When you use Facebook or Instagram live sessions, you can talk about your brand or product while your listeners chat discussing everything said by you.
What else do you need to know about visual marketing?
Obviously, visual marketing helps marketers engage the audience and share the information more persuasively. But what do you need to know about visual marketing more?
- It is a part of branding
Visual marketing has a direct connection with your brand voice. All the visual elements you use in your branding create a straight line between your brand and the brand’s perception of your audience. Each color that you use, font, and brand’s characters — it reflects your branding.
- It helps measure marketing efforts
As with any other marketing strategy you use, visual marketing requires setting benchmarks to see if you meet KPIs. You might wonder what KPIs it is worth drawing your attention to. To name a few — reach and engagement in the number of sales, email subscribers, social shares, etc.
- It makes your marketing campaigns simplified
When you launch a marketing campaign, you strive to share as much information as you can. You believe that your audience will understand your marketing message better if you suggest more details. The truth is that no one likes to consume tons of information. Instead, use visual marketing variations and present information that is worth users’ attention in the form of visuals.
- Be careful with making changes in your visual marketing
It has been already stated that visual marketing has a strong correlation with branding. As visual marketing adds value to the level of engagement your brand gets, it can harm as well. If you make significant changes in a brand’s visual concept, your audience may not recognize it afterward. Right before making any changes, run A/B testing and see what option would work for your brand the best.
How to Make Your Visual Marketing Work
Visual marketing won’t work if you don’t know what steps to take. Besides, wrong attempts at implementing a visual marketing strategy will hurt your brand.
To make sure that visual marketing works, follow the following steps:
- You know that every brand has a story behind it. You should create your own. And you can do this via content. The visuals will help you tell the story in colors.
- Work on creating powerful visual content. One thing when you support your content with images and videos, the other — when you include infographics, graphs, and other comprehensive visuals.
- Set KPIs and measure the effectiveness of every visual marketing campaign.
- Analyze your niche. Try to figure out what companies use visual marketing in their business strategy and whether it is effective or not. Find out what they do to make their visual marketing work efficiently.
- Don’t hurry up to use all visual marketing assets. Analyze at what stage you are and what exact assets would work for you right now.
Follow these small steps and reap the benefits of your visual marketing strategy.
Originally posted on Mentionlytics: https://www.mentionlytics.com/blog/visual-marketing-guide
